Please help us to prove that open-access anthropology can work!

In making Cultural Anthropology free to read, we have given up our most significant source of revenue. We need your help to ensure the financial viability of the journal into the future. Please consider making a donation, big or small, to our publishing fund. And if you aren't a member of the SCA, please think about joining.

Ethics: Integration

by Clara Han

In this last post, I want to circle back to Hayder Al-Mohammad’s compelling discussion of “being-with” as what allows for the intelligibility of a notion of ethics in the first place. How does this thought emerge in and by way of ethnographic description? In his post, Hayder offers two scenes: 1) the giving of fruits or sweets to a friend; and 2) the everyday struggles of Iraqis since the invasion in 2003. Here, I consider these small gestures in conversation with recent work on “ordinary ethics” (Das 2012) in order to suggest that such small gestures have embedded within them the so-called “large” or “macro” that both Joshua Griffin and Peter Benson draw attention to. How then might we revisit a notion of the “scalar”?

Let us turn to the first scene in which Hayder suggests that “joy and pleasure” might be “caught within the experiences of others intimate to us”: “one small gesture” amongst his Basran friends is to buy fruit or sweets and “simply drop them off at someone’s house”. I want to focus on his phrase, “simply to drop them off at someone’s house.” Might simply indicate that there are manners by which one lives that gesture as pleasure or joy? Through its very casualness or a kind of easy-going thoughtfulness - a light touch that, in its very lightness, may show the great care one takes in and of relationships. In other words, living the “being-with” implicates not only the fact of sharing, but how that sharing is performed in order to be felt as “sharing” and not something like, for example, indifference or rudeness.

In my work in a low-income neighborhood, or población, in Santiago, Chile, I discuss how a neighbors may respond to another neighbor’s “critical moment” - when money runs short because of irregular wages often paired with the demands of monthly debt payments. While women work hard to contain these critical moments within the web of intimate kin, telltale signs seep out: bruises from a domestic fight, lights cut, children crying from hunger. Women may acknowledge these critical moments, but these moments are concealed through their very casualness and nonchalant manner, a manner which conceals the great care with which women treat specific threats that critical moments pose in this world. Thus, acknowledging occurs through concealing, and through concealing, the dignity of another is kept intact (Han 2012).

This is a register of normativity that is implicit: the ways in which doing things just feels right, the tone feels proper to the circumstances. “Ordinary ethics” thus asks us to move from orienting oneself “to transcendental, objectively agreed upon values” to “the cultivation of sensibilities within the everyday” (Das, 2012: 134). I take Hayder’s words as expressive of this shift in orientation when he remarks, “I have as yet found no Quranic verse, nor portions from the Traditions, which has made clearer to me, or the people I work with, the coordinates by which life is lived, or should be lived, in postinvasion Iraq”. I also take this comment as unsettling a recent body of literature that has attempted to carve out an “anthropology of morality” as a particular “subfield”, but one that holds fast to a notion of morality as obligation to a set of codified rules.

To engage people’s everyday struggles is to take seriously the idea that the manner in which one responds to need is enmeshed with the very material dynamics of need (see Englund 2012). As I just mentioned, responding is not only responding to a biological survival, but rather the way in which one responds leaves intact the other’s dignity. Attending to the way in which an aesthetics of responsiveness is enmeshed with materialities of economic precariousness and other forms of everyday insecurity - such as police occupation or the insecure boundaries of war - shifts a given perspective in which those “little histories” are posed against or “contextualized” by “broadscale processes”; of the “experience-near” understood as immediate experience, the interpersonal, and the intersubjective vis-a-vis the “experience far” understood as “corporate strategy and political economy”. For, it is precisely in these small gestures of concealing need in Santiago and the toils that go into maintaining a life in Basra that we may appreciate the ways in which the so-called “large events” of war and economic reform are lived. Through attending to the small gesture, the everyday struggle, we also come to understand that boundaries of war and the time of the event are never so easily secured. This requires not “a step back”, but rather to be further “drawn in”: to allow aspects of a world to be disclosed to us rather than framing global injustices to bolster our own stable sense of moral indignation.

It is here that I would argue that the “being-with” is never just a condition of “the personal” as both Joshua and Peter seem to suggest. I take Hayder’s idea of “being-with” as opening up to the question that we might be unethical in the ways in which we live our lives, lives entangled with other lives, deaths, and materialities. Rather than think of the scalar in terms of the “local” versus “the global”, we may think the scalar in terms of what might emerge within our very ordinary existence: that I eat other creatures, wear clothes that may products of a global textile industry, that I use a computer that will become extremely toxic waste. These are the impersonal that runs like veins through me, yet they are not immediately and constantly present to me. What might be the toll of being constantly and utterly present to the multiple ways in which I am permeated by the unethical (akin to being constantly aware of my own heartbeat)?

In a different direction, we might ask if something like “the biographical” is wholly personal or has an immediate face-to-face quality. Sophie Day has acutely elaborated sex workers’ difficulty of stitching together the biographical into one single coherent narrative and one single duration. Plural bodies that inhabit different times make for biographical disruption that itself exacts a great toll on the women (Day 2007). In a quite different setting, Lisa Stevenson attends to the affects that emerge when the end of a life story is not available to community (Stevenson 2012). Cut from community in the name of the welfare state’s “care”, the Inuit are exposed to an anonymous death. Stevenson’s ethnography is not simply posing the face-to-face community against a faceless anonymous bureaucracy. Rather, the end of a life story is constitutive of the birth of community, “We can imagine life unmoored from the physical presence of another body, as future children are named in dreams and remembered after death. Names and bodies are continually being realigned” (Stevenson, 2012: 603-604). Community survives as links between the living and dead are created through the force of the name. Biography here is the “ever-expanding nexus” - made up of all those small gestures of “being-called” - and what “brings human life into existence” (Ibid: 605). Thus, I return again to Hayder’s words to close - not in the gesture of “integration” but of simply responding. In taking seriously the thought that “our existential co-ordinates are ex-centric, but so too our ethical coordinates and responsibilities”, we may have to further elaborate the impersonal, the unethical, and the scalar, but in ways that permeate an ordinary flesh-and-blood existence.

Clara Han is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She works on the intersections of state violence, health, and economy, with specific attention to moral experience and intersubjectivity. She earned her MD/PhD from Harvard University in 2007. Her new research brings her work on health and poverty into dialogue with the anthropology of law. It focuses on neighborhoods, incarceration, and kinship networks amidst the War on Drugs in Santiago, Chile. She is co-organizer of the multi-disciplinary Critical Global Health seminar at Johns Hopkins. Her book Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chilehas recently been published by UC Press. In 2011 she also published an article in CA titled "Symptoms of Another Life."

Comments

Posted By
Jonah S. Rubin

May 13th

Thank you for this thought provoking piece. It really helps me to think through my own research in new ways. I work with a social movement trying to locate, exhume, and honor the bodies of those who were murdered in the Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship. For them, part of their ethical practice involves attempting to re-suture the biographies, names, and (what remains of the) bodies of the dead, using forensic science, visual media, documents, and oral testimonies. The practice is incredibly difficult for many of the reasons you name: the biography told by the relatives of the deceased is hardly ever the same biography as that told in the fascist archives. This is all to say that, as is so often the case, it seems that our own ethical dilemas are also the same ones faced by many of the people we work with. That and (as you imply) the idea that these questions may extend beyond our "flesh and blood existence" to our bones and the memories we leave behind in the hands of others.

Posted By
Clara Han

May 14th

Dear Jonah,

Your project is extremely interesting. I was wondering if you had seen the recent anthropological work on forensic anthropology and state violence. You might want to look at the work of Isaias Rojas-Perez at Rutgers whose work in Peru attends to the problems of the missing body for law and for those who live on. It is deeply thought-provoking.